While posting the photos for Good Witches of the Between, Part Two I was drawn to the detail photographs I had taken documenting the painting's development. Petra has been working with watercolor paints in the studio this past month and I was eager to play with them too. The detail photos provided a starting point down a side path that I could explore with Petra's input.
I printed 35 photos on 4 inch x 6 inch [10 cm x 15 cm] glossy photo paper I had received 'free' with the purchase of ink for a previous printer. I next glued the photos randomly onto 7 inch x 10 inch [17.5 cm x 25 cm] pages of an inexpensive, multimedia sketchbook originally purchased for Franz who had decided he'd rather just draw and stick to dry media in a book, plus he liked the plain black cover of the other sketchbook better. Knowing the gloss paper would resist the watercolor, and that the photos needed a bit more adhesive than the glue stick provided I gave each photo and part of the surrounding page a brush-over with Liquitex acrylic matte varnish. On some of the photos a foggy, brushstroke is visible and the medium impacts the pooling and adhesion of the watercolor paint to the photo and sketchbook papers. The sketchbook paper is a bright white, and approx. 80lb so it has a tendency to warp and buckle. Some of the photos are beginning to come unglued. In order to scan the photos better I removed the pages from the sketchbook; they are shown here in the order they were painted. Each watercolor was produced quickly, with little contemplation; just a response to the photos and its placement on the page, and how the watercolor was flowing and drying. A few of the paintings incorporated rubber cement acting as a mask to keep the page white, draw on a shape, or simply to reduce the amount of layering of color in a certain area of the painting. Photos of the paintings production were taken; however, the images shown here are all scans of the paintings at this 'finished' stage of the process.
Thoughts on going forward: working over some of the paintings using other media, perhaps acrylic to seal the watercolor layer; printing the scans on other papers; working over the printed scans in more watercolor or other media.